Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the info, whew, that is a lot. One passage stands out for me,
since I thought the same thing:
"It always amazes me how sincere the poor are in
paying back their loans. If a bank staff meets a defaulting borrower,
who has discontinued her contact with the bank for a period of several
years, and reminds her about the outstanding loan, she never says
"Forget it", or "Who Cares". She always says: "I am sorry I could not
pay back. I'll like to do that as soon as I can"."
These very poor people seem to have a morality of promise-keeping that many
corporations don't have... Think of Enron.
My reference to "the secret of original accumulation" is of course
tongue-in-cheek, but the serious issue to which it refers concerns the
problem of how you can create markets where there are none because people
are too poor to buy very much (That is not to say they don't trade at all,
because they barter and so on). In the age of bankers' capitalism,
micro-credits seem to be a logical answer to that problem. Serious analysts
though rapidly arrive at the conclusion that property relations are an
essential factor, but there the analysis more or less stops... It often does
not occur to them that the possessions of some could depend on the
dispossession of others...
If micro-credits are the best we can do these days, the poor will be poor
for a long time!
Jurriaan